Emmie was indignant. “Mr. Leahurst! He is going to marry Miss Parker.”
“That wouldn’t need to make any difference. There’s such funny arrangements nowadays.”
“Mr. Leahurst!”
“All right.” He spoke in a tone of invincible melancholy. “I’m very helpless. I s’pose I shall fall back into the clutches of those girls.”
“Oh, no!” Emmie, scarcely knowing what she said, implored him not to do that. As in a dream, she heard herself assuring him that he was meant for a better fate; urging him to be true to himself, to keep his eyes on the heights, to climb upward from the slough.
He went out dolefully; giving Louisa a couple of one-pound notes, in order to prove that he bore no malice.
These excitements and interludes had helped her through some of the months that she had been counting. The pretty little love story was going to have a happy ending. Mildred, bouncing in and out of the flat, brimmed over with joy as she described the changed attitude of her parents. Indeed, if the dear child could have heard Mr. Parker talking at his club, she might have been able to report a more rapid progress in the desired direction. For certainly Mr. Parker showed at the club that he was at least accustoming himself to the idea of theatrical connections.
“That young man Alwyn Beckett,” said Mr. Parker, “has been offered two hundred pounds a week to go to America. Till recently I had no notion that actors’ salaries ever reached such a figure.”
“Oh, that’s nothing,” said a well-informed member of the club; “nothing at all, compared with what they get for film-acting.”
“Is that so? Well, Beckett is on the films too. It seems he has become a universal favourite. We know him personally. He and my son, Hubert, were up at Cambridge together, and they have never lost sight of each other.”